Today I worked on a friend's PC with a bad copy of AVG Free installed. Whenever I tried to run it, it would throw the message "Could not initialize AVG Anti-Virus kernel interface."

I tried uninstalling it, but I received the same message. I ended up googling the error message, and someone suggested to download the installer to actually remove it. Unfortunately, the installer quickly said it had uninstalled... too fast to have actually done anything.

When I tried to install it again, it again went too fast to have performed any tasks. When I tried to start AVG, I received the same message.

I tried deleting all the files, but avgse.dll refused to delete; even after using Unlocker.

I went into regedit, searched for "avg" and deleted everything related to AVG. Be careful if you decide to do this as you can seriously screw your system up, particularly since you will get more hits than stuff related to AVG (Acrobat has a few entries).

I rebooted after doing this and was finally able to delete avgse.dll and the entire Grisoft folder. Finally, the reinstaller actually worked!
Posted on Saturday, April 14, 2007 8:19 PM
Troubleshooting
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